Brent Pin­heiro 

brent.pin­heiro@guardian.co.tt 

Trinidad & To­ba­go joined sev­er­al oth­er coun­tries on the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion’s Lev­el 4 COVID-19 Ad­vi­so­ry List. The an­nounce­ment on Tues­day, in the US pub­lic health agency’s week­ly up­date, comes mere days af­ter T&T reg­is­tered 10,000 ac­tive COVID-19 cas­es. Ac­cord­ing to the CDC, a coun­try is moved to Lev­el 4 when more than 500 cas­es per 100,000 res­i­dents are reg­is­tered in the past 28 days.    

T&T was pre­vi­ous­ly at Lev­el 3, which on­ly ad­vised against nonessen­tial trav­el if un­vac­ci­nat­ed. The Lev­el 4 trav­el cat­e­go­ry ad­vis­es Amer­i­cans to avoid trav­el to T&T un­less vac­ci­nat­ed due to very high lev­els of COVID, how­ev­er, the agency warns that even ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple may be at risk of get­ting and spread­ing COVID-19 vari­ants.   

“Ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed trav­ellers are less like­ly to get and spread Covid-19. How­ev­er, in­ter­na­tion­al trav­el pos­es ad­di­tion­al risks, and even ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed trav­ellers might be at in­creased risk for get­ting and pos­si­bly spread­ing some COVID-19 vari­ants,” the agency says on its web­site.   

T&T’s bor­der pol­i­cy al­ready on­ly al­lows vac­ci­nat­ed non-na­tion­als to en­ter the coun­try. How­ev­er, there is noth­ing pre­vent­ing un­vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple hold­ing dual na­tion­al­i­ty from en­ter­ing once they present a T&T pass­port at Im­mi­gra­tion.    

Poland, Niger, and Papua New Guinea were al­so added to the list yes­ter­day. There are over 70 coun­tries al­ready at Lev­el 4 on the CDC’s list, in­clud­ing Bar­ba­dos, Do­mini­ca, Ger­many, and the Unit­ed King­dom.